%0 Journal Article
%T Valuing Diversity: Buddhist Reflections on Equity and Education
%A Peter D. Hershock
%J The ASIANetwork Exchange
%D 2014
%R http://doi.org/10.16995/ane.129
%X Presented as the Keynote Address at the 2013 Annual ASIANetwork Conference in Bloomingdale, Illinois, this essay uses three of Buddhism's central insights to forward a qualitatively robust conception of diversity and to substantially revise what we mean by equity. The first insight, is that all things arise and are sustained interdependently. Interdependence is not a contingent, external relation among essentially separate entities; it is internal or constitutive. As Fazang (643-712), one of the leading Chinese Buddhist philosophers of the 7th and 8th centuries put it: interdependence entails interpenetration. A second, core Buddhist insight is that our conflicts, troubles and suffering can only be sustainably addressed on the basis of things yathabhutam or ˇ°as they have come to be,ˇ± and not simply as they are at present. This insight calls into question the ˇ°time-space compressionˇ± (Harvey: 1990) that characterizes the postmodern lifeworld, the contemporary fixation on immediacy, and the erasure of temporal depth that results from the near equal proximity granted to all information by the light-speed connections of the internet. Finally, the world of human experience is irreducibly dramatic or meaning-laden. Stated in more explicit Buddhist terms, our histories and the experiences out of which they are woven are at root a function of karma. According to this teaching, if we pay sufficiently close and sustained attention, we will witness a meticulous and dynamic consonance between the complexion of our own values, intentions and actions and the patterns of outcome and opportunity we experience.
%U https://www.asianetworkexchange.org/articles/10.16995/ane.129/